Alexander Todorov: Quality Assurance According 2 Einstein

Quality Assurance According 2 Einstein is a talk which introduces several different ideas about how we need to think and approach software testing. It touches on subjects like mutation testing, pairwise testing, automatic test execution, smart test non-execution, using tests as monitoring tools and team/process organization.

Because testing is more thinking than writing I have chosen a different format for this presentation. It contains only slides with famous quotes from one of the greatest thinkers of our time – Albert Einstein!

This blog post includes the accompanying links and references only! It is my first iteration on the topic so expect it to be unclear and incomplete, use your imagination! I will continue working and presenting on the same topic in the next few months so you can expect updates from time to time. In the mean time I am happy to discuss with you down in the comments.

This principle can be applied to any team/process within the organization. The above link is reference to a nice book which was recommended to me but the gist of it is that we always need to analyze, ask questions and change is we want to achieve great results. A practicle example of what is possible if you follow this principle is this talkAccelerate Automation Tests From 3 Hours to 3 Minutes.

THE ONLY REASON FOR TIME IS SO THAT EVERYTHING DOESN’T HAPPEN AT ONCE.

The topic here is “using tests as a monitoring tool”. This is something I started a while back ago, helping a prominent startup with their production testing but my involvement ended very soon after the framework was deployed live so I don’t have lots of insight.

As the first few days this technique identified some unexpected behaviors, for example a 3rd party service was updating very often. Once even they were broken for a few hours – something nobody had information about.

Since then I’ve heard about 2 more companies using similar techniques to continuously validate that production software continues to work without having a physical person to verify it. In the event of failures there are alerts which are delath with accordingly.

NO PROBLEM CAN BE SOLVED FROM THE SAME LEVEL OF CONSIOUSNESS THAT CREATED IT.

That much must be obvious to us quality engineers. What about the future however?